Their friendship had begun in New Rochelle, and was sufficiently evolved by May 1939 to merit a mention in Time. A reporter who spotted Rockwell at the latest Society of Illustrators annual costume ball in Manhattan noted: “He and Mead Schaeffer, his good friend and fellow romancer, turned up at last week’s ball in costumes they were then engaged in painting.”12
A confusing sentence. Presumably the reporter meant that Rockwell was wearing a theatrical costume from his own collection, a costume in which one of his models had posed. Something Colonial, perhaps a ruffled white shirt and long waistcoat, a tricorn hat. “He really liked costume parties,” the illustrator George Hughes recalled of Rockwell.13
* * *
After the two men settled in Arlington, Rockwell would frequently call Schaeffer for advice on a particular painting in progress. Schaeffer would be in his studio within minutes, in front of his easel. “He wanted confirmation,” Schaeffer later said, “not an opinion. He was so boyish.”
As Rockwell became closer to Schaeffer, his friendship with Hildebrandt frayed. Hildebrandt felt hurt, displaced. In addition to being Rockwell’s studio assistant for about a decade, he had posed for more than a dozen paintings, accompanied Rockwell across the country, taken him up to the peak of Mount Whitney, and shared a bed with him in a cabin in the Canadian wilderness. He had introduced him to Mead Schaeffer, and now Rockwell, it seemed, desired Mead’s company exclusively.
Perhaps it was just that Rockwell had tired of using him as a model, much as he had once tired of using Billy Payne. He needed new faces and figures to keep his art fresh. Whatever the cause of their rift, it was lasting. Rockwell failed to mention Hildebrandt in his autobiography, a conspicuous omission. And when Rockwell sold his house in New Rochelle, a few years after moving to Vermont, he left one painting in his studio.14 The new owners loved having it even if it wasn’t by him. It was a portrait of Rockwell painted years earlier by someone they had never heard of, Frederick Hildebrandt.
* * *
In September 1940, the U.S. Congress passed the Selective Training and Service Act, inaugurating the first peacetime draft. Most Americans wanted nothing to do with the calamity in Europe. But as Hitler’s armies continued their invasions, President Franklin D. Roosevelt saw fit to prepare.
On October 4, 1941, an Army private by the name of Willie Gillis made his first appearance on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. Willie was a soldier in the U.S. Army—a short, sweet-faced young man who is shown leaving an Army camp post office with a wrapped parcel. He peers nervously over his shoulder as a group of six (larger) officers walk in unison behind him, casting predatory glances at his booty. Is it a ham? The oval package is wrapped in white paper and tied with twine. It is addressed, in a mother’s neat script, to Private Willie Gillis, at the Army base in Fort Dix, New Jersey. And so Willie was introduced to America, name and all.
Willie is a boyish figure, an American innocent, and readers of the Post were enchanted. Here was their absent brother and absent son. When you look at his face—the chubby cheeks, the jug ears, the open, honest expression—it is unimaginable that anyone could think of harming him.
Rockwell decided to turn Willie into a regular character, which he had never tried before. There would be a series of Willie Gillis covers, eleven in all, spaced out over the war years. “The artist credits his wife Mary with the idea of repeating the Willie Gillis character and also with naming the inductee,” a reporter noted in 1941.15 Mary named Willie after a character in one of two books she read to her children. Some have made the case for Wee Gillis, an under-recognized picture book about a Scottish orphan that won the Caldecott Honor Award in 1939. But probably it was Rudyard Kipling’s short story, “Wee Willie Winkie,” whose protagonist is a soldier-naif. He does not use his real name—the dreaded Percival—any more than Norman Perceval Rockwell did.
At any rate, many Post readers mistook Willie for an actual resident of Vermont, though of course he was a fictional character. The boy who modeled for him, Robert Otis Buck, of West Rupert, Vermont, was a high school student of sixteen. Rockwell first spotted him in the summer, at one of the regular square dances held on the West Arlington village green, and could not stop staring. Buck stood five foot four, with a young face and a lock of brown hair falling down his forehead.
The life of Willie Gillis, as related by Rockwell, ran counter to the nation’s dominant military narrative. It shifted attention from glamorous military men—from marines and sailors and pilots seated in open cockpits with their long, white scarves fluttering behind them in the sky—to the lowly, unsung infantryman. Just two weeks after Willie Gillis made his debut, a young cartoonist named Bill Mauldin introduced a soldier named Willie into a strip that had previously featured only Joe,16 perhaps following Rockwell’s lead. In the next few years, Mauldin’s Willie and Joe moved to the military newspaper Stars and Stripes and its two disheveled “dogface” protagonists became household names. The journalist Ernie Pyle noted, “War makes strange giant creatures out of us little routine men who inhabit the earth.” Little routine men—they were the heroes not only of war but of all of American life. That was Rockwell’s view certainly and it would acquire the force of a national credo in 1942, when Vice President Henry Wallace paid homage to the “Century of the Common Man.”
* * *
In the fall of 1941 Rockwell was visited by a feature writer for Family Circle magazine. The article, “He Paints the Town,” characterized him as a beloved citizen of Arlington.17 Photographs taken on a crisp fall day showed the five members of the Rockwell family fetching their bicycles from the barn, the image of sporty togetherness. There were also photographs of Arlington residents who had posed for Rockwell—including Sheriff Harvey McKee; Bob Buck (of Willie Gillis fame); Dan Walsh, who drove a mail truck and did an occasional Santa for Rockwell; and Nippy Noyes, the town’s jowly and full-bellied postmaster, whose corpulence made him a favorite Rockwell model for doctors and judges. The article conveyed the impression that Rockwell’s work was a communal effort in which most of the town participated on a day-to-day basis. By the time it appeared, Rockwell had been basking in the California sunshine for four months.
* * *
He left Vermont in early November, and missed the whole drama of a New England winter, staying away until the snow melted and the trees began to bud. By then, he had made extensive improvements to the house and hired live-in help, a capable middle-aged couple, just as he had in New Rochelle. In Vermont, Bessie Wheaton cooked and took care of the Rockwell boys, and her husband Thaddeus, a former sewing-machine salesman in his fifties, became Rockwell’s handyman and gardener and occasional model. But now that the house was finally winterized and fit to be occupied year-round, Rockwell decided he had to get out. Like most everything else he genuinely wanted, he also longed to be free of it.
He flew out west by himself. “Norman, who has badly needed a vacation for some time, suddenly decided he would like it in California,” Mary wrote in a letter, on November 11, 1941. “So he is on his way and the children and I leave Friday.”18
It was his first trip to California since 1935 and, as usual, he stayed with his in-laws in Alhambra. The local art scene had changed since his last visit and lost its most talented painter. Frank Tenney Johnson had died suddenly of spinal meningitis, in 1939, at age sixty-four. He supposedly contracted the disease one week after kissing the hostess of a Christmas Eve party, an anecdote that has somehow outlived medical plausibility.
Vinnie Johnson, the artist’s widow, was still residing on Champion Place, next door to the building that had served as her husband’s studio. This is where Rockwell now settled in, 24 Champ, sharing the space with Forsythe and displaying his usual gift for transplanting himself and his artistic production to a new atelier three thousand miles from his home without missing a day of work. He could burrow in anywhere. He was astoundingly portable.
His friendship with Forsythe had been sustained without effort since the long-ago da
ys when they had rented Frederic Remington’s studio in New Rochelle. Now they were in the studio of another painter of the Old West and Frank Johnson’s paintings as well as his cache of Indian artifacts—jugs, blankets, arrowheads—were still there. The memorabilia was freighted with meaning for Forsythe, a painter of desert landscapes.
Rockwell, by contrast, had no interest in romanticizing the West in his paintings. He spent a good chunk of his life among western painters who were fixed on visions of distant horizons and heroes on horseback, and who never could have anticipated that Rockwell would be the one whose work came to define the essence of America.
It was on this trip that Rockwell inaugurated a casual friendship with Walt Disney, who was seven years his junior. Then forty years old, Disney was at his creative zenith, a middle-aged wunderkind whose film studio had released a string of animation hits: Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Dumbo. His first feature-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, of 1937, had landed him on the cover of Time, where in a photograph he is both dashing and amusing. He sits at a desk in an open-necked shirt, a dark-haired man with a long, lean face and a toothy smile, playing with figurines of Happy, Grumpy, Doc and the rest. Like Rockwell, Disney was an intuitive populist who had enormous faith in the taste of the American public. When asked if he was an artist, he inevitably demurred, claiming his only goal was to enchant the public.
Although Disney seemed to derive pleasure from little besides work, he did have at least one pastime: he played polo, describing his skill as middling to poor. He gave it up in 1938, after injuring his neck in a match.19 Instead, at the invitation of Forsythe—friend and fellow cartoonist—he joined Los Rancheros Visitadores, a riding club that allowed wealthy businessmen to play at being “cowboys” and apparently was less dangerous than polo. Once a year the group took a weeklong camping trip along the old trails in the Santa Ynez Valley, north of Santa Barbara. Rockwell, who was afraid of horses, was not a member, but Disney harbored a great admiration for his artistry and asked Forsythe to bring him by for a tour. So Rockwell went to see the sprawling, state-of-the-art Disney studio compound in Burbank, a horse-free zone.
While he was in California that winter, Rockwell undertook portraits of Walt’s two young daughters. Eight-year-old Diane Disney and five-year-old Sharon posed for a photographer in their father’s office and in a matter of days Rockwell had finished and delivered two lovely charcoal drawings. Diane, the dark-haired daughter, gazes out with a curious, almost pinched somberness, while Sharon smiles sweetly beneath her blond bangs and big hair ribbon.
Writing to Rockwell on December 31, Disney thanked him for “the swell portraits of my kids,”20 which he hung in his office. He seemed more moved by the portrait of Diane. “You captured a mood in my older daughter that I think is wonderful because at times she is such a serious thing and has often given me that same look that brings me off my high horse.”
Rockwell also gave Disney a copy each of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, the Heritage editions he illustrated, and Disney shelved them with care. As he wrote: “You may rest assured that they are in good company, along with the works of Pershing, H. G. Wells, Mussolini and many other famous guys!”
Benito Mussolini? “Good company” is not the first phrase that comes to mind. The attack on Pearl Harbor had occurred only three weeks earlier. The day after President Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war on Japan, Hitler and Mussolini announced they were at war with the United States.
* * *
In March 1942 Rockwell returned home to Vermont and the quiet of the countryside. “Well, I’ve been back a week and it’s fine but I sort of miss all the excitement of the Champion Place studio,” he wrote to Forsythe on the 23rd, using his wife’s engraved stationery as usual.21 “Everyone seems less excited about the war here than out there. When I do get the dope on the poster situation, I will let you know.” He and Forsythe were itching to contribute to the war effort by designing recruitment posters.
His letter continued: “I guess you read about the big shake-up at the Post. Everyone out and a whole new editorial staff in.” Wesley Stout, whom Rockwell had always disliked, had been fired on March 12, after displaying an egregious lapse of judgment. He had somehow allowed into print a foolish and offensive article, “The Case Against the Jew.”22 It was written by Milton Mayer, a thirty-three-year-old journalist, left-winger, and conscientious objector who himself was Jewish. It excoriated Jews for abandoning their ancient faith to assimilate into America’s materialistic gentile culture, and claimed they had sacrificed their soul in the process. A tone-deaf “editor’s note” at the start of the piece read: “Mr. Mayer’s scorn for his fellow American Jews is exceeded only by his scorn for the gentiles.”
Overnight, subscriptions were canceled, advertisements were pulled, and the board of directors of Curtis Publications held an emergency meeting at which it was decided to sack Stout, effective immediately. Newspaper accounts of his departure were vague, claiming he resigned because of “a firm but friendly disagreement with the Curtis Publishing Company on policy.”23 In came Ben Hibbs, who would turn out to be a surprisingly effective editor. He was relatively young (forty-one), unpretentious and sensible, a former Kansas newspaperman who moved over from The Country Gentleman, another Curtis publication.
His first task was to try to regain the trust of readers. He wrote a formal apology that was published in the Post as well as in costly three-quarter-page advertisements in The New York Times and other major newspapers. “The Post never has been, is not now and never will be anti-Semitic in belief or expression,” Hibbs wrote in the ad. “It is not anti to any group.”24 He pledged to publish articles that would affirm the magazine’s commitment to racial and religious tolerance.
To compensate for the loss in advertising, the Post was forced, for the first time, to raise the price of a newsstand copy. It went from a nickel to ten cents, starting with the issue of May 30. Far more ominous was the loss of the Post’s circulation lead. In 1942 Life pulled into first place and became the largest-circulation weekly in the country, with 3.4 million subscribers. The Post had 3.3 million and it would never regain the lead.
* * *
For Rockwell, the contretemps over the article was deeply disturbing, in part because there were rumors that the Post was about to fold. When he thought about the Post going under, he wasn’t sure whether his career would be over, or whether he would be better off. At least his life would be in his own hands. Tired of answering to Post editors, he wanted to do something major, to alter his fate. He imagined doing a poster that could define his times, his country in wartime.
He saw, in retrospect, that he had acted immaturely during World War I. Unlike Clyde Forsythe and the Leyendecker brothers and other artists he had known in New Rochelle, he had neglected to create war posters, had contributed nothing, besides his brief time drawing cartoons in the Navy. And what could be done now? Perhaps the moment had already passed. Anyone could see that the future belonged to photography. Looking back on his career, he thought of his paintings of boys and dogs and shuddered. He wanted to restore illustration to greatness. He wanted to be as heroic as Howard Pyle. He wanted to create one great image, and this is what he was up against: a world that had become far more image laden since the last war. A generation of Life photojournalists on the one hand and fine artists on the other, thousands upon thousands of image makers, were competing to abet the war effort.
FIFTEEN
THE FOUR FREEDOMS
(MAY 1942 TO MAY 1943)
On May 21, 1942, Rockwell was in the other Arlington—Arlington, Virginia, threading through the halls of the new, low-lying Pentagon building. He had gone there seeking final approval for a poster design. Through an organization called the Artists Guild, he had been assigned to promote the U.S. Army Ordnance Department, which was responsible for distributing weapons.1
Rockwell’s poster was predictably martial. Actually, it’s more Leyendecker than Rockwell, a nighttime scene in which a
hunky, helmeted solider crouches on a hill and fires his last round of bullets. “Let’s Give Him Enough and On Time,” the poster urges, referring to ammunition. Robert Patterson, the undersecretary of war, liked it enough, but requested that Rockwell portray the soldier in a pair of slacks rather than in juvenile breeches and leggings.2
That day in Virginia, Rockwell visited the Graphic Division of the War Department’s Office of Facts and Figures, which sounds like something out of George Orwell’s 1984 but was not at all nefarious. The agency oversaw the production of war-themed posters and billboards. Rockwell met with an official, Thomas D. Mabry, a former administrator at the Museum of Modern Art, who recalled telling him: “One of our most urgent needs and one that was most difficult to fill was a series of posters on the four freedoms.”3 He was referring to the Four Freedoms, a wartime variation on the Bill of Rights that had been laid out by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a ringing speech before Congress and incorporated, in the summer of 1941, into a declaration he drafted with Winston Churchill.
Rockwell returned to Vermont with a printed copy of the Atlantic Charter, as the declaration was known, intending to read it over and pick out choice sentences to illustrate. But when he read the text, the language was nebulous and abstract (“First of all, their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other”) and hardly visual. What does a picture of “no aggrandizement” look like? Or, for that matter, how do you paint a defense of the democratic world? How do you visualize freedom without resorting to such staples of patriotic illustration as Uncle Sam in his top hat or Lady Liberty with her long Greek robe and outstretched arm? Those were the images that had beckoned from posters during World War I.
American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell Page 22